During tax season many Americans will be turning to the IRS for help. Unfortunately for them, the IRS has not been very efficient or effective in answering calls. According to the treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the IRS has fielded only 6.3 million calls out of a total of 40.5 million attempted calls, a total of 15.6 percent.
Last tax season wasn't much better in comparison. According to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, during the thick of tax season of 2015, only 37 percent of calls made to the IRS reached customer service representatives. With an average wait time of 23 minutes, and “courtesy disconnects” that would end the call when no representatives were able to take the call, only added to a caller's frustration. To make matters worse, the IRS abolished the option to leave a voicemail requesting an in-person meeting. They now force taxpayers to send an email requesting such appointments, placing a burden upon the elderly, disabled, and those without email access.
Waiting on hold is always aggravating. But calling the Internal Revenue Service can be especially frustrating because you are nearly guaranteed a long hold time, assuming you can get a human being on the line at all. In the fiscal year that ended Sep. 30, 2015, a Government Accountability office (GAO) report noted that the IRS provided “the lowest level of telephone service compared to prior year, with only 38 percent of callers who wanted to speak with an IRS assistor able to reach one”. “This lower level of service occurred despite a fall in demand, and average wait times still topped 30 minutes.” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, responds to the report by observing that “reaching an IRS employee often seems as unlikely as winning Powerball.” Much of the lack of service is due to inefficiencies at the IRS and to budget cuts.
It is in this environment that the present invention “EnQ” has arrived. A newly launched service, EnQ delivers on its promises to let users “cut the queue” and get in touch with an IRS agent for a fee. The concept is familiar to amusement park patrons. Disney has their Fast pass and Six Flags offers the Flash pass. The idea of having someone else wait on hold for you is not, in itself, an innovation. Several companies offer some form of this service. Virtual Hold technology was founded in 1995 and pioneered the idea of having a call central call a customer rather than forcing them to wait on hold.
Lucy Phone, founded in 2010, allows customers to call a company and then hand off the call if they are put on hold. The service calls the customer back once a customer service agent picks up. A competitor, Fast Customer, is an app that works in a similar way. Lucy Phone and Fast Customer are free for consumers to use. However, the IRS has explicitly instructed its agents not to accept calls from Lucy Phone, Fast Customer or similar services. While there are other services trying to reduce or eliminate hold times for customers, EnQ is different not only in its focus, but in its methods. Callback-based services do not actually decrease the time between when you initiate a call and when you speak with a representative; they just free you to do other things while you are waiting. What is needed in the art is for a robot to initiate a call to the IRS before the robot has a customer to hand off the call to. It then offers to sell its place in line. The fees are based on the caller's time on the IRS line, which is almost equal to the “talk time” with the IRS.
The present invention does this process, called “EnQ”. Much as some airlines allow frequent fliers to call a separate customer service line or credit cards sometimes have shorter waits for holders of elite level cards, it might at first seem intuitive that those willing to pay a premium can reduce or eliminate hold times.
EnQ allows its customers to eliminate the risk of IRS “courtesy disconnects”, which is when the IRS hangs up on the caller because of overloading. The IRS, in their infinite wisdom, will hang up on callers who have patiently waited 2 hours because they are unable to take their call at that time. These callers do not get a credit for their lost time and will need to call again starting from the back of the queue and risk being disconnected again. The risk of a courtesy disconnect is more substantial during waiting on hold, hold music phase. The risk of a disconnect decreases significantly once the IRS customer service agent answers the phone. With the present invention, the courtesy disconnects still occur, but that is EnQ's burden to bear and shield their customers from this frustration. EnQ's customers wait in the EnQ inbound queue until a confirmed connection to the IRS is established, and then EnQ gives its line to the customer. Thus EnQ saves its customers the aggravation of having to call the IRS over and over again from the suffering from IRS' courtesy disconnect. This invention not only decreases the customer's hold time but also mitigates the risk of the customer experiencing courtesy disconnects.
An alternate implementation of this invention is a callback service. A customer notifies the EnQ system, perhaps through a website, a wish to talk to the call center (IRS). The EnQ system would then wait for a connection to the call center and immediately call the customer. In this implementation, the customer would not have to call EnQ nor wait the few minutes of EnQ hold time.
EnQ's founder claims that the volume of calls it initiates is so small it won't appreciably impact IRS wait times. IRS wait times are a real problem that government officials should address, but EnQ is poised to make the wait times shorter for its customers. Other customer service centers such as the VA, social security or Medicaid or civilian agencies may be improved with this invention.